For all the buzz around entertainment and/or social apps, from Angry Birds to Instagram, if you talk to VCs and angel investors in 2012, many say they're most excited about two other areas: health and education. There are plenty of startups looking to attract their attention in both.

Glooko is one in the former category. Based in Silicon Valley, it focuses on people with diabetes, providing an app that downloads data from their blood glucose meter to log it, for personal analysis and for sharing with doctors. It raised $3.5m of funding in January 2012, and it has just launched in Europe.

"With diabetes in your day-to-day life, a lot of it is about managing information," says Glooko's Tracy DeMiroz. "We're trying to help people get on with their life, yet still take control of their diabetes."

Glooko actually has two products that work together. First, an iPhone app (Android is in development) that logs all the blood glucose readings, and second a cable to connect the iPhone with one of 11 popular blood glucose meters.

Why a cable? Wi-Fi and Bluetooth aren't exactly high on the new-features priority lists for the manufacturers of these meters, so needs must.

With an estimated 360m people living with diabetes globally – 2.9m of whom are in the UK – that's a lot of people taking a lot of meter readings, often writing them down in notebooks, if they store them at all.

Glooko is aiming to change that by storing the data in its "logbook" app, which can then be printed out for medical professionals, or simply perused at the user's leisure.

The latter feature has just been improved in the version of Glooko's app available in the European Union with charts to help compare readings over time – US legislation currently doesn't allow this kind of analysis there, according to DeMiroz.

Readings can be tagged with data about meals and other factors that might affect blood sugar levels, too. "If you're in the doctor's surgery and they ask you what you were doing on 13 June, a diligent person might look in their notebooks, but most people would say they're not sure," says DeMiroz.

Glooko is careful to make it clear that its app is not diagnosing dietary problems, nor is it offering other advice – it's simply a way of making the data on readings available in a clear format, to be acted on.

"This is our first go-to-market app, but we are developing the next one," says DeMiroz. "You can imagine it will have a lot more charting and graphing built in, as well as things we can do with PCs and the cloud. That direction, and also sharing. If you're in your 70s for example, you may well have a circle of care, who you'd like to share this data with."